“Now,” Sam Fathers said, “shoot quick, and slow.”
The boy did not remember that shot at all. He would live to be eighty, as his father and his father’s twin brother and their father in his turn had lived to be, but he would never hear that shot nor remember even the shock of the gun-butt. He didn’t even remember what he did with the gun afterward. He was running.
Then he was standing over the buck where it lay on the wet earth still in the attitude of speed and not looking at all dead, standing over it shaking and jerking, with Sam Fathers beside him again, extending the knife. “Dont walk up to him in front,” Sam said. “If he aint dead, he will cut you all to pieces with his feet.
Walk up to him from behind and take him by the horn first, so you can hold his head down until you can jump away. Then slip your other hand down and hook your fingers in his nostrils.”
The boy did that — drew the head back and the throat taut and drew Sam Fathers’s knife across the throat and Sam stooped and dipped his hands in the hot smoking blood and wiped them back and forth across the boy’s face.
Then Sam’s horn rang in the wet grey woods and again and again; there was a boiling wave of dogs about them, with Tennie’s Jim and Boon Hogganbeck whipping them back after each had had a taste of the blood, then the men, the true hunters — Walter Ewell whose rifle never missed, and Major de Spain and old General Compson and the boy’s cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of his father’s sister, sixteen years his senior and, since both he and McCaslin were only children and the boy’s father had been nearing seventy when he was born, more his brother than his cousin and more his father than either — sitting their horses and looking down at them: at the old man of seventy who had been a negro for two generations now but whose face and bearing were still those of the Chickasaw chief who had been his father; and the white boy of twelve with the prints of the bloody hands on his face, who had nothing to do now but stand straight and not let the trembling show.
“Did he do all right, Sam?” his cousin McCaslin said.
“He done all right,” Sam Fathers said.
They were the white boy, marked for ever, and the old dark man sired on both sides by savage kings, who had marked him, whose bloody hands had merely formally consecrated him to that which, under the man’s tutelage, he had already accepted, humbly and joyfully, with abnegation and with pride too; the hands, the touch, the first worthy blood which he had been found at last worthy to draw, joining him and the man for ever, so that the man would continue to live past the boy’s seventy years and then eighty years, long after the man himself had entered the earth as chiefs and kings entered it; — the child, not yet a man, whose grandfather had lived in the same country and in almost the same manner as the boy himself would grow up to live, leaving his descendants in the land in his turn as his grandfather had done, and the old man past seventy whose grandfathers had owned the land long before the white men ever saw it and who had vanished from it now with all their kind, what of blood they left behind them running now in another race and for a while even in bondage and now drawing toward the end of its alien and irrevocable course, barren, since Sam Fathers had no children.
His father was Ikkemotubbe himself, who had named himself Doom. Sam told the boy about that — how Ikkemotubbe, old Issetibbeha’s sister’s son, had run away to New Orleans in his youth and returned seven years later with a French companion calling himself the Chevalier Soeur-Blonde de Vitry, who must have been the Ikkemotubbe of his family too and who was already addressing Ikkemotubbe as Du Homme; — returned, came home again, with his foreign Aramis and the quadroon slave woman who was to be Sam’s mother, and a gold-laced hat and coat and a wicker wine-hamper containing a litter of month-old puppies and a gold snuffbox filled with a white powder resembling fine sugar.
And how he was met at the River landing by three or four companions of his bachelor youth, and while the light of a smoking torch gleamed on the glittering braid of the hat and coat Doom squatted in the mud of the land and took one of the puppies from the hamper and put a pinch of the white powder on its tongue and the puppy died before the one who was holding it could cast it away.
And how they returned to the Plantation where Issetibbeha, dead now, had been succeeded by his son, Doom’s fat cousin Moketubbe, and the next day Moketubbe’s eight-year-old son died suddenly and that afternoon, in the presence of Moketubbe and most of the others (the People, Sam Fathers called them) Doom produced another puppy from the wine-hamper and put a pinch of the white powder on its tongue and Moketubbe abdicated and Doom became in fact The Man which his French friend already called him.
And how on the day after that, during the ceremony of accession, Doom pronounced a marriage between the pregnant quadroon and one of the slave men which he had just inherited (that was how Sam Fathers got his name, which in Chickasaw had been Had-Two-Fathers) and two years later sold the man and woman and the child who was his own son to his white neighbour, Carothers McCaslin.
That was seventy years ago. The Sam Fathers whom the boy knew was already sixty — a man not tall, squat rather, almost sedentary, flabby-looking though he actually was not, with hair like a horse’s mane which even at seventy showed no trace of white and a face which showed no age until he smiled, whose only visible trace of negro blood was a slight dullness of the hair and the fingernails, and something else which you did notice about the eyes, which you noticed because it was not always there, only in repose and not always then — something not in their shape nor pigment but in their expression, and the boy’s cousin McCaslin told him what that was: not the heritage of Ham, not the mark of servitude but of bondage; the knowledge that for a while that part of his blood had been the blood of slaves.
“Like an old lion or a bear in a cage,” McCaslin said. “He was born in the cage and has been in it all his life; he knows nothing else. Then he smells something. It might be anything, any breeze blowing past anything and then into his nostrils. But there for a second was the hot sand or the cane-brake that he never even saw himself, might not even know if he did see it and probably does know he couldn’t hold his own with it if he got back to it. But that’s not what he smells then. It was the cage he smelled. He hadn’t smelled the cage until that minute. Then the hot sand or the brake blew into his nostrils and blew away, and all he could smell was the cage. That’s what makes his eyes look like that.”
“Then let him go!” the boy cried. “Let him go!”
His cousin laughed shortly. Then he stopped laughing, making the sound that is. It had never been laughing. “His cage aint McCaslins,” he said. “He was a wild man. When he was born, all his blood on both sides, except the little white part, knew things that had been tamed out of our blood so long ago that we have not only forgotten them, we have to live together in herds to protect ourselves from our own sources.
He was the direct son not only of a warrior but of a chief. Then he grew up and began to learn things, and all of a sudden one day he found out that he had been betrayed, the blood of the warriors and chiefs had been betrayed. Not by his father,” he added quickly. “He probably never held it against old Doom for selling him and his mother into slavery, because he probably believed the damage was already done before then and it was the same warriors’ and chiefs’ blood in him and Doom both that was betrayed through the black blood which his mother gave him.
Not betrayed by the black blood and not wilfully betrayed by his mother, but betrayed by her all the same, who had bequeathed him not only the blood of slaves but even a little of the very blood which had enslaved it; himself his own battleground, the scene of his own vanquishment and the mausoleum of his defeat. His cage aint us,” McCaslin said. “Did you ever know anybody yet, even your father and Uncle Buddy, that ever told him to do or not do anything that he ever paid any attention to?”
That was true. The boy first remembered him as sitting in the door of the plantation blacksmith’s shop, where he sharpened plough-points and mended
